


The Legend, Dad & her Hero

by sinisterkid92



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Gen, future story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 03:36:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8694838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterkid92/pseuds/sinisterkid92
Summary: A young girl knows all the stories of all the Arrows because her mother tells them every night. Everyone except the one where he died. Her own dad died the same night as the Green Arrow, but her mom never talks about him, so she settles for the Arrow. Her aunt does talk about her dad. But then she puts a few things together, and doesn't really know what to think about that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was only supposed to be a half-assed story that I wouldn't finish. But I did! If anyone's waiting for an update on PoP... I shouldn't even be wasting time writing this, so that update is some ways away. Will explain more in that chap update if anyone's interested.
> 
> Twitter: balsebalfebalse  
> Tumblr: decker-chloe
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

In the legends told in hushed whispers as the sun took its dying dive down the sky as it made way for the dark of night, he would live on. Taking on many shapes and looks in the minds of children, countless drawings filling up the classroom walls, he became the stranger he’d always known he was. Immortality was not the incapability of dying; it’s being unforgettable. Maybe one day he would be regarded as a mythical creature, rather than one who actually lived, or he would pique the interest of historians as they worked their way through the archives of old news papers. 

The girl who could tell all the stories of the Green Arrow was the girl who sat at the back of the classroom hiding behind a long curtain of dark hair. If anyone asked her the best part of her day was when her mother snuck into bed with her at the end of the day and told any story she could remember until her words grew longer and heavier. Her mom would always be the first one to fall asleep, and she wouldn’t sleep herself until that happened. 

Her fascination with all the different Arrows wasn’t so strange considering her own history. She’d been barely a thought in her mother’s head when the Arrow died. Her dad had died during that time as well. She didn’t know how, or when, because those were the stories her mother didn’t like to tell. Her aunt was a good storyteller, though, especially when it came to her dad. Most of her stories were of her daddy being naughty when he was younger, and those made her giggle the most. She had one of those laughs that made the people around her feel like all of their worries had been swept away, and all things were puppies and rainbows.

Everyone knew that Emilia Queen didn’t have a dad. Emilia hadn’t quite figured out why everyone knew who she was as soon as she told them her name, and that bothered her. Cerebral like her mother she had approached this issue like a puzzle to solve. Sneaking into her mother’s tablet that didn’t have the kiddie locks as soon as she could read well enough on it she’d discovered her father’s infamous history. There were stories that not even her aunt would tell her. Her father’s humanity had disappointed the child. That her own image of her father didn’t match up with who he was really like had her chewing her nails down so much that they started hurting. Even the nail polish that was supposed to help her stop chewing on them didn’t help. 

Being a dad without a child must have been hard, she thought once. She knew she had an older brother that lived in another city, and that her dad had only met him a few times. Maybe that was why he did bad things, she reasoned, because something big was missing and he couldn’t do anything about it. Emilia knew that she sometimes made her mom sad when she did things because she missed her dad. Like when she threw the ring her dad had given her mom at the wall because her dad wasn’t there to take her to the father daughter dance. Her mom had showed her the ring as she told a story of the second time her dad had proposed to her, but it had only made Emilia so mad that she couldn’t do anything but throw it. She had regretted it immediately when she’d seen her mother’s face. Her mom had been so sad she hadn’t even yelled at Emilia, and that made her feel more shame.

She wanted to ask her mom why her dad had peed on a cop car. It didn’t make sense to her. But asking her mother meant admitting that she had violated the rules. She wasn’t allowed on mommy’s tablet, or to go online, especially not unsupervised. Which was why she saved it for aunt Thea who, hopefully, would just be impressed that she could get onto her mom’s locked tablet when she was only eight years old. Even though she was the youngest in her class because she had skipped a grade none of her classmates knew how to hack into a tablet. 

A thought that churned in her stomach was when the stories Thea told her and the stories her mom told of the Arrow started to sound too much alike. Even the big belly baby burger her mom had bought for her had lain uneaten on her plate as her mom watched her think over it. With a fry she painted patterns on the napkin with the ketchup, and hadn’t she looked so adorable with the deep frown her mom would have told her to stop playing with the food. Eventually the girl had reached a definite end to her thoughts, and needed her mom’s input to get over the hurdle that blocked her mind.

”Mom, was dad the Arrow?” Emilia asked then. The look on her mother’s face prompted her to continue, it was completely blank and unmoving. Maybe her mom didn’t know he was the Arrow, Emilia thought, that would be bad. ”I mean you told me that the Arrow was gone two summers, and those two summers Thea also said that dad was gone, and dad was gone on an island for many years, and when he came back someone became the Arrow, and then the Arrow died and daddy died too. I know I’m not supposed to go online by myself but I did it at the library at school, and there are many people who think that dad was the Arrow.”

Just like her grandmother her mother had inherited the rambling gene, and that same gene had been passed down to Emilia as well. It was rarely utilized by the child because she wasn’t as outgoing as her father, nor her mother. It had bothered her mother for a while that her daughter didn’t have many friends, if any at all, but as her child seemed harmonious and content in her solitude she’d decided not to worry over her too much. 

During Emilia’s short life her mother had always thus far had answers to any question Emilia sprung at her. Sometimes it required independent research where she would give the full answer in full later on, but her mom would always say if she didn’t know something and had to look it up. This time her mother had no answer. What she had was a sudden need to clear the table. 

With plates banging against each other her mother took something out on them. The same furrow that had knotted Emilia’s eyebrows together could bee seen on her mother’s face, and seemed to get deeper by the minute. When there were no dishes left to clean she started with the counter tops instead. Even though it was Friday and it was take-out night and the counters weren’t messy at all. 

”This is a secret,” her mother had said eventually when the counter tops and even the doors to the cupboards were glossy and clean. ”That means that no one but your mom and your aunt Thea can ever hear about this, understood?” Emilia nodded her head vigorously. But before her mom told her anything she had to go upstairs and get ready for bed. This story would be her bed time story. 

In her bedroom she was surrounded by things that once were her dad’s. Anything from trinkets he kept for years and years, to t-shirts that he had worn that her mom would wrap her in when she was a baby. They no longer smelled like him, and had been washed since, but they had once been his, he had lived in those clothes, and it only made sense for her and her mom to keep them. She took her favorite shirt of his, one that was threadbare and its color faded after rigorous use as a blankie, and hugged it to her chest. 

”You know how your dad and I met?” her mom started. Emilia shook her head. Her mom didn’t talk about dad, and Thea didn’t talk much about that part of his life. Thea usually talked about her dad before he went missing on a boat and got stranded on an island. ”Well, he came with me because he had a computer that he needed information from. The problem was that the computer had been broken… by many, many, bullet holes.” Emilia frowned, and just like her mother had asked on that day she wondered how it had been shot with bullets, and just like her dad had replied she said he had sat at a café in a bad neighborhood. ”But that was a lie. It had been broken by bullets when your dad had chased after a criminal as The Hood.”

”I knew it!” Emilia said with a gasp. Thinking it, and actually knowing it, were two different things. 

”He was always the different Arrows, but he changed names when he needed to to avoid being caught by well meaning officers. What your dad did was illegal, and some of the stuff was also bad. But he learnt, and he got better, but it was complicated and I never want to glorify all the things your dad did because I was very angry at him sometimes for what he did. He was a hero though, and he saved me, and he saved this city over and over again until the day he died.” For nearly a decade she had cried over Oliver’s death, and when there seemed to be no more tears left to cry, when she thought that now she could live with the grief of losing him, it would crash all over her again. It was less like a truck load of pain now, more like slamming into a brick wall of grief and regret. What hurt the most was her daughter, and that she would never meet her father. It hurt that she never got to tell Oliver that he would have a child, a daughter. That he never got to see her be born, or watch her grow up, to be a dad to her. Even her daughter’s name tore her apart at the time because they’d never discussed name. They’d never even discussed children. Felicity had always thought of herself as too young with too much to do, and their lives too uncertain, and their relationship still fairly new. It was unplanned, and it was cruel, but there was no choice to be made back then. She never regretted their daughter, not for one microsecond. 

”How did he die mom?” Her daughter’s hand on her wet face brought her back from her thoughts. They’d never discussed it more than that her father had died in a car crash. She’d known she’d get caught in the web of lies of she talked more about it with her daughter. She went with the official cause of death, and Emilia never questioned it.

”There was this man who was doing bad things and your dad went there to stop him. I don’t know what went wrong, but I think it was a trap. There were a lot of people there that your dad wanted to get to safety, and he got distracted by something. He was shot by someone many times, and Spartan…. Diggle, took him to this place where which we, or I guess more me, called the lair. There was nothing we could do to save him, nothing even a hospital could do. Your dad didn’t want anyone knowing who he was so we… staged Oliver Queen’s death. It was the only way for your dad’s secret to remain a secret.”

Emilia could feel her heart beating heavily inside of her chest like a drum that demanded its presence to be known. Tears were pressing behind her eyes, and she did her best to keep them in so that she could see her mom’s face properly as she told the story. Every word changed her expression, ranging from conflicted, to sad, to serene, to angry, and finally ending with a smile that had an edge of sad to it. 

”He would have loved you so much Emilia,” she whispered into her daughter’s ear before planting a kiss against her temple. In the end it didn’t matter how much he would’ve loved her because he couldn’t, and that was what settled in the silence between them. What they were left with were what ifs and fantasies of could have beens. For the thousandth time Emilia thought of the unfairness in that she did not get to have a dad. Of all the dads in the world it was hers that had to die, hers that had to be a hero and save others. 

”He shouldn’t have been a hero mom, he should have been my dad.” She crossed her arms, leaning away from her mother and away from the comfort her mother offered, as if her father’s death was justified because he died as a hero.

”Do you know how many little girls and little boys, as well as big boys and big girls, who have their dads because of your dad?” Emilia shook her head, her bottom lip stuck out and she had released the hold she had on her tears. Now they were streaming freely down her face, and even though she tried to keep them quiet she couldn’t help the heavy sniffles as they came harder and harder. ”You know Carolyn in your class? Did you know that because your dad put a guy called Ivan Donald in prison her dad got home from the store in time to celebrate her big sister’s first birthday?”

”Carolyn is stupid,” Emilia muttered. ”She’s nine and she can’t even spell ’definitely’, she spells it def-i-antly.”

”Maybe so, but she and many, many, others have their dad because of your dad. Think about how much he’s done, that he lives on in everyone who is alive because of him. And you know how that number will grow and grow for centuries. One day the whole world might be descendants from people he saved?” Felicity hugged her daughter tight, pulling her up in her lap like she did when she was a baby, rocking her back and forth for what must have been nearly an hour before her daughter spoke again. The little voice was raw with grief and hurt, but there was a tinge of hopefulness that could be detected in the words.

”I just wish he was alive to be _my_ hero too.”

”Did you know that I helped him, that I was like his side-kick? And after he died I worked with Spartan, Speedy, Mister Terrific, and all of them until you were born?” Emilia shook her head. ”So your dad might not get to be your hero, but I can be your hero every day of your life.” The little body sank further into her mom’s body, wrapping two arms as far around her mom as she could.

”You will be the best hero ever,” Emilia said then. ”You already are.”


End file.
